What is cardiomyocyte differentiation?

What is cardiomyocyte differentiation?

Cardiomyocytes are the chief cell type in the heart and their coordinated contraction as a mass is responsible for the pumping of blood around the developing embryo. Cardiac specification occurs very early on during embryonic development.

What are iPSC cardiomyocytes?

Patient-specific iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes (iPSC-CMs) offer an attractive experimental platform to model cardiovascular diseases, study the earliest stages of human development, accelerate predictive drug toxicology tests, and advance potential regenerative therapies.

How do pluripotent stem cells differentiate?

Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) that have two distinct features: the ability to proliferate in the undifferentiated state (self-renewal) and the potential to differentiate in response to differentiation stimuli.

What type of stem cell is a cardiomyocyte?

Embryonic stem cells can be induced to differentiate to beating heart muscle cells (cardiomyocytes). One way to confirm that they really are cardiomyocytes is to visualize certain proteins that are typically produced by heart cells.

What is the function of cardiomyocyte?

Cardiomyocytes are the cells responsible for generating contractile force in the intact heart. Specialized cardiomyocytes form the cardiac conduction system, responsible for control of rhythmic beating of the heart.

What are the characteristics of cardiomyocyte?

Moreover, cardiomyocytes have several unique cellular structures that allow them to perform their function effectively. Here are five main characteristics of mature cardiomyocytes: (1) striated; (2) uninucleated; (3) branched; (4) connected by intercalated discs; (5) high mitochondrial content.

How do you differentiate iPSC into cardiomyocytes?

Patient-specific cardiomyocytes can easily be derived by reprograming adult somatic cells into iPSCs and then differentiating these into cardiomyocytes. ESCs and iPSCs have the potential to form a teratoma if injected directly into the heart,16 and thus must be differentiated into cardiomyocytes prior to implantation.

How are iPSC derived?

iPSC are derived from skin or blood cells that have been reprogrammed back into an embryonic-like pluripotent state that enables the development of an unlimited source of any type of human cell needed for therapeutic purposes.

What are criteria for pluripotent stem cells?

The definition of pluripotent stem cell is based on two properties: self-renewal and potency. The self-renewal is the capacity of the stem cells to divide indefinitely, producing unaltered cell daughters maintaining the same properties of the progenitor cell.

What’s a cardiomyocyte?

From the perspective of cell biology [23], a cardiomyocyte is a contractile, excitable heart cell that has a central nucleus, that has specific sarcomeric protein isoforms that distinguish it from other muscle cells, and that contracts rhythmically without rest.

How can you distinguish stem cells?

One of the oldest methods for stem cell differentiation is the generation of embryoid bodies (EBs). Generally, when stem cells are cultured without an adherent surface, feeder cells, or a complex matrix, the cells aggregate. These aggregated cells spontaneously differentiate. An EB contains all three germ layers.

What is iPSC used for?

Induced pluripotent stem cells are widely used in therapeutics for disease modeling, regenerative medicine, and drug discovery (Figure ​4). There are many applications of iPSCs in the fields of gene therapy, disease modeling and drug discovery.

What is iPSC differentiation?

As pluripotent cells, iPS cells theoretically have the ability to generate all cell types found in the body. Human iPS cells have been differentiated into a variety of these, including adipocytes, cardiomyocytes, primitive hematopoietic cells, pancreatic beta-cells, and several different neuronal cell types.

What can iPSC differentiate into?

Human iPSCs have the unique ability to differentiate into any cell type of the body including: Ectodermal: Neuron, Astrocyte, Oligodendrocyte, Retinal Epithelial Cell (RPE), Epidermal, Hair and Keratinocytes.

How do you confirm pluripotency?

There are several methods for assessing pluripotency potential. These include detection of an alkaline phosphatase which is specifically related to pluripotency, evaluation of various cellular markers via immunostaining techniques, and use of the widely-cited teratoma assay.

How do you assess pluripotency?

To assess pluripotency, WiCell uses the StemDiff™ Trilineage Differentiation Kit to directly differentiate cell cultures to the three germ lineages – endoderm, ectoderm and mesoderm. Flow cytometry is then used to assess the expression of markers specific for each of the three germ layers.

How is stem cell differentiation regulated?

Differentiation of stem cells is tightly regulated by interactions between extrinsic differentiation signals and intrinsic pathways. Since stem cells have extensive self-renewal capacity, the repression of differentiation genes in undifferentiated stem cells must be stable and heritable during cell division.